After a summer long hiatus, I’m back. At least I’m resilient and don’t give up, I’ll give myself that at least. For the second summer in a row, I spent it eating what I wanted and again, ate all the vegan ice cream. Side note, seriously try it. There’s no need for us to consume regular ice cream when vegan ice cream is so darn tasty!

I also spent lots of time with friends, and many of those nights involved more drinking than I would like which usually led to a second dinner late at night in addition all the calories I drank. All of this contributed to some slight weight gain over the summer. Bummer.

At least, I have proven I can maintain my 60 lb weight loss BUT I want to go further. I want to stop losing weight in the winter, only to gain it back in the summer. I know I can do this and it doesn’t matter how long it takes. I have always wanted to have a sustainable journey.

In late August, I had just finished off a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Vegan Ice Cream and I KNEW both my husband and cousin Clint had more in the fridge. When I asked Paul for a couple scoops of his ice cream he said, go ahead but here’s how my conversation with cousin Clint went:

Me: Hey can I have some of your ice cream?

Clint: You just finished a whole pint and some of Paul’s.

Me: I know, but I want more and I know you have some in the house.

Clint: I’d like to save mine for later.

Me: I can buy you more later. Please! Just one scoop? (Note: I said just one but I would have for sure tried to bargain for the entire container).

Clint: You know you’ve already had enough.

Me: I know, but this is it! This is my LAST ice cream until next summer.

Clint: You always say that and you already had enough.

Me: I don’t care, it’s in my head and I know you have ice cream in the house and I can’t get it out of my head until I eat it all.

Clint: You definitely have binge eating disorder.

Me (laughs): Oh my gosh, you’re right. I actually FORGOT!

Clint: Let me look up the definition of binge eating.

Clint: Reads me a definition he found:

“Binge eating is when you eat a large amount of food in a short amount of time and feel you can’t control what or how much you are eating. If you binge eat regularly—at least once a week for 3 months—you may have binge eating disorder.

Clint: I think you need to tackle binge eating to get to your goal.

Me: You’re right. I can’t believe I forgot I’m a binge eater.

You see, when I was binging on pizza it was SO OBVIOUS and more frequent. With my new lifestyle, binges MAYBE occur once a week max, but that old pattern of behaviour is still there and does kick in once in awhile, basically just enough to either maintain my weight loss or go slightly up. Put another way, just enough to sabotage me from getting to my ultimate goal of losing 100 lbs in total.

Clint’s gentle nudge sent me down a rabbithole for answers where I came across a Reddit poster that said Brain Over Binge by Kathryn Hansen changed his life and he no longer binges.

Naturally I purchased the book and recovery guide as I want to take ACTION and go through the steps. Listening to the book has been like having someone so clearly articulate my own experiences but what I found FACSINATING was the simplicity of her approach. Below are the two key principles to her approach:

1. Learning to dismiss urges to binge; and
2. Learning to eat adequately.

Genius. This speaks to me. I KNOW I learnt to dismiss urges to eat animals once I decided to transition to vegan. I used to mark an X on my calendar for each day I didn’t eat pizza. It felt like I was white knuckling it and thinking about pizza constantly until day 17 arrived and then I was free of the daily urges at least. After day 17 the urges were less intense and less frequent and now I am completely free of my urge to eat animals or any animal product.

I also learnt to dismiss urges to smoke when I quit smoking decades ago. Now I don’t think about eating animals, I’m not wishing to eat animals and I’m not thinking about smoking or wishing to smoke.

As Kathryn explains in her book and as I have personally experienced, most professionals have told me that there’s a REASON I binge, that there’s something that happened to cause the binge, perhaps something in my childhood to kick off this disorder. I have always said, I have no clue what happened because EVERYTHING causes me to binge, a good day, a bad day, a sad day, a celebratory day, a regular day, boredom, stress and on and on and on. I actually gave up bothering to solve binge eating because of how absolutely overwhelming and unhelpful traditional counselling has been for me. Changing my way of eating to whole foods has helped immensely because I don’t tend to binge on whole foods, BUT since I eat vegan processed food from time to time, the binge eating still makes an appearance.

So I’m working through the book and focusing on solving my 30+ year binge eating disorder. While I do that, I won’t be posting my weekly weight loss, but will instead post a video of what I ate that week for accountability. You can check out my first video here. The videos are nothing fancy and will generally be short and sweet but sometimes I’ll share thoughts or take you on a ride with me as I do some meal prep.

Peace, love & plants,

Michelle 😊

p.s. Check out the Brain over Binge website for free resources, and paid resources such as an online course and group or individual coaching.